**The Official Sapphire Pure Innovation (Gruper) Thread**

Soldato
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Well we have been waiting for these for months and im happy to say, i took delivery of mine this morning :cool:

Took a quick pick with my terrible Camera phone :





The board is very well packaged and looks really impressive,

Over the next few hours im going to get this thing installed along with FX 55, X850XTPE, and 2gig Corsair.

So hopefully as more of you guys get these , we can share our thoughts (and problems) in this thread. ;)
 
That looks sweet, pure white :D

I'd be very interested as to the overclocking potential of this board and the bios options, keep us updated.
 
very nice m8 :)

can you take a close shot at the area below?
sapphire7bb.jpg


cheers
 
ken1307 said:
very nice m8 :)

can you take a close shot at the area below?


cheers

leave it with me and i will see what i can do :)


The bios has more options than a DFI :cool: i have no idea what half these Ram options do. The only one option its lacking is power on by keyboard , which is no big deal i suppose and may come in a later bios update.

The placement of the components on the board is very good. The Graphics card has got so much room around it, and the Freezer 64 went on with no problem.

XP is all loaded on without any problems so far, Copperhead Mouse detects on every boot which was an issue with my abit An8 Ultra.

Going to load up everything else now and do abit more testing.


edit, found these if its any use to you



 
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thanx Coolasmoo for the pix but what I wanted was checking the capacitors on your board as theres rumor Sapphire using a crappy cap on retails board instead of the good one in the review board

nway, wuold be great if you could take some pix later
let us know how it OC :D

cheers :)
 
How's she running for you Coolasmoo m8ty ?

I too am keen to find out whether Sapphire are using using Teapo Caps ( Bit Poo) for CPU regulation on retail Groupers .
 
Jimbo Mahoney said:
What are the advantages of this over a DFI Ultra D?

Not sure there are any unless you want to be different or prefer ATi to NVidia, there is a fairly major drawback though the southbridge chipset performance is really poor.
 
mmj_uk said:
Not sure there are any unless you want to be different or prefer ATi to NVidia, there is a fairly major drawback though the southbridge chipset performance is really poor.

OK.

Yeh, I read about poor USB 2.0 speeds, although that wouldn't bother me.

I guess it's a bit more tweakable than the DFI, but doesn't warrant changing to this if you already have Nforce 4 I guess...

Just itching for an upgrade! :D
 
Just going to try and take them pics you wanted but to be honest, they look no different than the screen shots above.


FYI

There is an option in the Bios for NB - SB port configuration (Standard or Enhance)

When i first installed XP with this option to Enhanced , i could not get the Onboard Lan to work (enabled in bios) and thought the thing was d.o.a

I changed the port to Standard and on the next reboot the Lan worked fine, but sata burst speeds seemed low.

I just went back into the Bios and re-enabled Enhance mode and lan still appears but the burst speed on sata2 has doubled :confused:

Just thought it might help anyone who has the same problem.
 
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Just found out why the Sata 2 is performing better.

In Standard mode the Sata2 Controller shares an irq with VGA

In Enhanced mode the irq's are changed and now they are both on seperate numbers.

Im still confused but it all helps i suppose :D
 
Looks very nice. :cool:

Get some clocking done on it and see how far it'll go. Also, could you verify that the retail version of this board has up to 4.0v vdimm selectable in the bios?
 
Kesnel said:
Looks very nice. :cool:

Get some clocking done on it and see how far it'll go. Also, could you verify that the retail version of this board has up to 4.0v vdimm selectable in the bios?


Yup 4.0Volts is selectable.


Im probrably not the best person to ask about overclocking, i just up the Multi on the FX55 and away she goes.

As for the bios options:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Gruper/6
 
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TheMooN said:
How's she running for you Coolasmoo m8ty ?

I too am keen to find out whether Sapphire are using using Teapo Caps ( Bit Poo) for CPU regulation on retail Groupers .

See post....

I have Good News. I picked up a Grouper today after inspecting it. Sapphire have changed the Caps as promised. The Retail Grouper has only Sanyo and Nichicon caps on board
 
split said:
See post....

I have Good News. I picked up a Grouper today after inspecting it. Sapphire have changed the Caps as promised. The Retail Grouper has only Sanyo and Nichicon caps on board


Thanks for that little nugget split :)
 
Aren't the Power options in the Bios to the CPU a bit lacking on this board? Think I read a review of it in Custom PC, basically the baord performed very well at stock speeds but was a not a real overclocker due this power issue? (Which I'm sure will be fixed in a later bios ;) )

If you have a windowed case the Board will look very nice. Doubt an XP120 would fit on it though :( thinks look a little tight around the CPU area.
 
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